The face in the mirror

It is yet another morning after. Your bathroom mirror, on the Wednesday morning after last Tuesday’s hearing, feels as if its just another news screen, looping more bad news.

Like one-third of Americans, you’ve been proud to call yourself one of our 45th president’s MAGA Trumpers. You are, of course, the face and politics of that person in your mirror. It is you, a proud Trump enabler. Just as you are proud to be a college graduate with a successful professional career.

The more you stare at the face in the mirror, the more it seems to morph into that other face you came to admire more than you dare to admit. It was the face of the young woman who seemed to be single-handedly rewriting JFK’s Pulitzer-winning “Profiles in Courage” as she testified on the horrific events of Jan. 6, 2021. She soon seemed far more mature, more patriotic and more emotionally together than the panicky, pathetic older men who were her bosses: President Donald Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and deputy chief of staff Anthony Ornato.

At first, you reflexively hated what she was saying about her bosses. But you could see she was telling tough truths about all she witnessed from her position astonishingly close to the power center of Trump’s White House.

You suddenly realized you no longer felt proud and honored to be known as a Trump enabler.

Hutchinson told us she’d heard the president’s men saying that enforcement officers reported pro-Trump protesters were armed with more than a few AR-15s, Glock-style pistols, bear spray, body armor, spears and flagpoles topped with spears. Secret Service was using magnetometers to screen the crowd for weapons before allowing them into the Ellipse grounds where Trump was about to speak. But the crowd was sparse and thousands were refusing to go through the magnetometer screening (apparently for obvious reasons). And that made Trump “furious,” Hutchinson testified. “I overheard the president say something to the effect of … ‘I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take that effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the effing mags away.”

It became shatteringly clear to Cassidy Hutchinson that the president she admired and enabled didn’t give a rodent’s patootie about just who would become the victims of armed pro-Trumpers after they breached the U.S. Capitol.

Fast Forward to Wednesday Night: Once again, you are staring into your bathroom mirror; and once again, it has become your news

screen. Yet another courageous conservative Republican woman, Rep. Liz Cheney, just spoke in Simi Valley, Calif., to a sizable crowd at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute. As Cheney recounted the week’s revelations, she stood in front of a huge blue backdrop that proclaimed in white letters: “A TIME FOR CHOOSING.”

“We have to choose,” Cheney said. “Because Republicans cannot both be loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.” Suddenly the large audience interrupted her with loud applause.